A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

BEMS’ New President: What Cell Phone Risk?

May 26, 2011

Niels Kuster may not have realized just how right he was when he warned that the Bioelectromagnetics Society (BEMS) was "threatened" by its "biased scientific culture." It's threatened no more. BEMS has succumbed. In an interview today following IARC's decision to classify cell phone radiation as possibly carcinogenic, New Zealand's David Black, BEMS' president-elect told a New Zealand reporter that he believed the question of radiation exposure risks from handsets had been settled. "There was never a good reason to think there was a problem in the first place." He said that he knows what's really going on: "There's a lot of people in academic careers whose futures depend on there being a continued problem, so there's a great deal of talking up of a continued problem." We doubt that this will help drum up interest in going to BEMS' annual meeting in a couple of weeks. We hear the early registration numbers are way down.

Sources say that Black was the hand-picked candidate of the U.S. Air Force. He beat Maren Fedrowitz of the School of Veterinary Medicine in Hannover, Germany.

June 2For more on Black's outlook, take a look at this news clip adapted from an upcoming New Zealand doumentary, "Is Your Cell Phone Killing You?"